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Science recently published a study done by its researchers in collaboration with the Information School at the University of Michigan that finds that Facebook isn’t entirely to blame for political polarization in the United States. It found that its own news feed algorithm has a small but significant effect on filtering out opposing news content for partisan users on Facebook. More importantly for the researchers, the algorithm did not have as strong an effect on filtering opposing news as users themselves. Predictably users on the far right and far left of the political spectrum filter their news content in line with confirmation bias theory.

Zenyep Tufecki already did a takedown of the sampling problems with the study. Here is the description of the sample from Science:

All Facebook users can self-report their political affiliation; 9% of U.S. users over 18 do. We mapped the top 500 political designations on a five-point, -2 (Very Liberal) to +2 (Very Conservative) ideological scale; those with no response or with responses such as “other” or “I don’t care” were not included. 46% of those who entered their political affiliation on their profiles had a response that could be mapped to this scale.

A key problem with this study is the standard problem of “selecting on the dependent variable.” By only sampling partisans, you are likely to find people who act in partisan ways when they evaluate news content. But my problem with this study runs deeper than selection bias. The study’s underlying assumption is that Facebook is simply a neutral arbiter of political information and it’s relevance is only applicable to those heavily interested in politics. In my view, Facebook’s influence runs much deeper. It changes the ways in which we relate to each other, and in turn, the ways in which we relate to the public world.

Facebook and related social media have created a seismic shift in human relations. Facebook’s platform takes conversations between friends, once regarded as “private sphere activity,” and transmutes it into what appears to be a public sphere for the purposes of serving the dictates of market capital. Facebook has created unique and powerful tools to allow individuals with the opportunity to more carefully “present themselves” to a hand picked circle of intimates (and semi-intimates). Facebook’s particular logic is connection and disclosure. More often than not, connection happens through expressive communication of feelings (pictures, observations, feelings, humor, daily affirmations, etc.). Facebook encourages us to “present ourselves” to our networks in order to form closer bonds with our friends and loved ones. It’s part of it’s business model. But we are in competition with others to gain the attention of our circle, so we are driven to use expressive discourse that is high-valence (e.g. strong attractive or aversive) content to gain the attention of others.

I argue in my 2012 book, Facebook Democracy, that Facebook constructs an architecture of disclosure that emphasizes this type of high-valence, expressive, performative communication. To Facebook, political content is simply one more set of tools we can use to “present” ourselves. If we want to use politics to connect with others, it needs to be impactful, expressive content that sends clear messages about who we are, not invitations for further conversation or clarification on public issues. This is not to say that people don’t argue on Facebook or have useful deliberative discussion, but I’d argue they do this in spite of Facebook’s goals. Argumentation or deliberation are not typically used to bring one closer to one’s friends and family.

While the personal and emotive is a key way in which we get into politics, staying engaged requires both expressive/connection based discourse and rational/deliberative discourse that encourages “listening” rather than simply “performing.” The notion that a “click through” necessarily means engagement with the ideas presented in “cross-cutting” articles suggest sharing cross-cutting/opposing articles is done in the spirit of deliberative discussion. More likely, cross-cutting articles are intended to reinforce an identity. More useful for Facebook scholars might be to look at instances where partisans are sharing cross-cutting articles and examining how they present the article. Are they presenting it and inviting mockery of it? Or are they inviting their networks into a conversation about it?

This is the key challenge that Facebook poses to democratic life. Rather than ask whether Facebook’s algorithm presents partisans with access to opposing views, we should be asking how we use political content on Facebook to present ourselves to others (and how we can do it in more productive ways). If Facebook and other media encourages expressive discourse over deliberative discourse, we run the risk of becoming a society of citizens that talk without listening.

Pew is out with its new survey of social media use and Facebook and it confirms the idea that we might be approaching what Slate’s Farhad Manjoo calls “Peak Facebook” in the United States. Two-thirds of Americans online are Facebook users. This is a slight increase from 2011 when 59% of internet users were on Facebook. But perhaps the most telling data is this:

20% of the online adults who do not currently use Facebook say they once used the site but no longer do so.

8% of online adults who do not currently use Facebook are interested in becoming Facebook users in the future.

What does this all mean? I wrote a book last year that argued that the need to connect with others powerful and Facebook has created an appealing “architecture of disclosure” that draws users into their own semi-intimate networks. The fact that the push out of Facebook seems to be stronger than the pull into Facebook at the present time suggests that Facebook is not the be all and end all of disclosure and connection. It would be interesting to know more about “Facebook defectors” and why they left. Pew has some data on this:

(21%) said that their “Facebook vacation” was a result of being too busy with other demands or not having time to spend on the site. Others pointed toward a general lack of interest in the site itself (10% mentioned this in one way or another), an absence of compelling content (10%), excessive gossip or “drama” from their friends (9%), or concerns that they were spending too much time on the site and needed to take a break (8%)

Other factors seemed to be at play here. It may be that there are two competing interests at play: a need to disclose and connnect versus a need to create distinct individual identities that are constantly exposed to novelty. The 10% who cited a “general lack of interest” might be at a place where they seek more novelty from their networks than they are getting. We should think of Facebook as part of this continuum. For those who are prone to or craving connection, Facebook is attractive. For those craving differentiation and novelty, less so.

HT: Xeni Jardin (Boing Boing)

An indulgent, self-promotion forthcoming… you have been warned!!

My new book Facebook Democracy is out and available through Ashgate press. Here’s a copy of the cover for you non-believers.

Tell you friends!!!

I start my forthcoming book Facebook Democracy with this quote from Carlos Castaneda’s mystical book Journey to Ixtlan where the Yaqui Indian Don Juan offers the young student some advice:

It is best to erase all personal history because that makes us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people. I have, little by little, created a fog around me and my life. And now nobody knows for sure who I am or what I do. Not even I. How can I know who I am, when I am all this? Little by little you must create a fog around yourself; you must erase everything around you until nothing can be taken for granted, until nothing is any longer for sure, or real. Your problem now is that you’re too real. Your endeavors are too real; your moods are too real. Don’t take things so for granted. You must begin to erase yourself

While I wouldn’t necessarily endorse this as a life’s goal, it is interesting to me to juxtapose this idea of “placing a fog around me and my life” with the demands of social media. It begs the question: where is the space for doubt, contingency and detachment in the world of social media. I ask this earnestly, fully recognizing that I might not “see the space” before my eyes. It is possible to be a “lurker” in social media, but from my conversations with students it seems like a frowned upon practice.

As a political scientist, what matters more to me is how “being too real” impacts our civic engagements with others. Does social media provide a “certaintly” about the world that inhibits our ability to make the detached observation necessary to appreciate the other? Or does it connect us more and thus make us more empathic and better able to appreciate the suffering of others? While a number of studies highlight how heavy Facebook users lead to greater levels of civic engagement through more exposure to diverse ideas and greater levels of interest in politics.

But is being exposed to diverse ideas the same as integrating diverse ideas into an uncertain and contingent self?  An interesting study would look at how people deal with political information with which they disagree.  Do they “unfriend” or “ignore” the information?  Anecdotally, it seems people I’ve talked to simply remove people from their feed rather than un-friend them.  How does engaging with different and potentially distasteful views change when the conversation is on Facebook rather than face-to-face?  Not sure I know, but hopeful to find out in the future.

Stephen Tippins in the American Conservative takes the Facebook/social media critique in the direction of “gender performance” in a way I hadn’t ever heard before:

Of particular concern for conservatives in the onslaught of social technology is its effect on masculinity; for modern man is not man in any real sense of the word. He is gender neutral and void of all chivalrous notions, save for vestiges in door-holding and table manners.

Tippins’ main point seems to be that Facebook encourages a weak, banal form of social connection that is characterized by inane gossip and narcissistic examinations of the self and others. He lays this at the feet of the feminist movement:

The feminist movement was consummated at least two generations ago, but the aggression continues. Eventually, the post-feminist woman, believing that she epitomizes equality and choice, will assimilate all men into her collective, until we all resemble either the metrosexual…. or the spineless runts that these women dominate at home.

The problematic feminist critique aside (you can just as easily say that women have been made “masculine” by the feminist movement if you wanted to go down the essentialist road), the implication is that being “networked” on Facebook or other forms of social media is akin to “being assimilated…into her collective.” A “real man” is not able to be captured by the network, but stands apart from it (see John Gault in the Fountainhead).

While I disagree with the author’s reduction of the possible ways of “being a man” to an essentialist choice between either John Wayne or a spineless runt, I’m intrigued by this idea of Facebook as being inherently feminist). Social Bakers has a great run down on gender differences in Facebook use. They find that there are more women than men on Facebook:

but more importantly women post more and disclose more about themselves:

According to feminist standpoint theory, women disclose more on Facebook because of different “cognitive styles” that result from the different “standpoints” of men and women in a patriarchal society.

The masculine cognitive style is abstract, theoretical, disembodied, emotionally detached, analytical, deductive, quantitative, atomistic, and oriented toward values of control or domination. The feminine cognitive style is concrete, practical, embodied, emotionally engaged, synthetic, intuitive, qualitative, relational, and oriented toward values of care.

If Facebook is about disclosure and connection with intimate and semi-intimate others, then it would seem to be more appealing to those who care about and are able to cultivate relationships (e.g. those who can “emotionally engage” and are “embodied” and “oriented towards values of care”). I haven’t thought about it too deeply, but I’d suggest that if the outcome of men joining Facebook is to have them adopt more “feminine qualities” then that’s all the better for society (trust me, there are still plenty of models of hypermasculinity out there for anyone who wants to find them). Personally, I think we’d be better off with more “integrated” men and women that cultivated the virtuous qualities of both the “masculine” and the “feminine.”

I’d really be interested in what others think about this.

This video of a parent unloading a clip in his daughter’s laptop in response to an angry post has gone viral and judging by the comments (on Facebook ironically enough) the video has touched a nerve.

This performance highlights a nagging sense among many parents that we have lost our way as a culture (and that social media is somehow responsible).  It in essence is tapping into a fantasy we have as parents that if we just practiced “tough love” and didn’t “spare the rod,” all would be fine.  Our children wouldn’t use Facebook and we would have proper, obedient, technology free children.  But the reality is that “tough love” won’t stop teens from wanting to have a separate space from parents.  I agree with the general sentiment many of the commenters posted regarding setting boundaries, but shooting a laptop isn’t teaching a lesson, it’s venting.   In my view, discipline has to come from a position of detached, dispassionate calm.  If discipline comes from anger, its hard to separate out what is in the best interest of your child and what’s just you “blowing off steam.”  If you watch this video, you can’t help but be struck by how much “venting” is going on as he is shooting his daughter’s laptop.  I’ve been angry like that before… there’s a lot of pain and disappointment underneath the bravado.

The main problem is that Facebook creates a “separate space” from parents where their content is recorded for posterity.  If the daughter could have vented without a digital transcript, the parent’s would have been none the wiser and the world would have been spared an ugly viral video.  This is the challenging and frustrating thing about our age — we’re not changing our core emotional make-ups, we’re losing discretion and discernment as to when we should express emotions.

James Fallows has an insightful article in the Atlantic how President Obama’s personality traits contributed to some of the challenges he has confronted in his first (and perhaps only term). Among these personality traits, Fallows reports on an aloofness that inhibits the president’s ability to form a wide network of friends (ala Bill Clinton’s famous FOB’s — Friends of Bill). Hence this president has a small network of friends from which to draw advice. As Fallows notes:

Like Clinton and unlike George W. Bush, Barack Obama is said to be a night owl. But in the wee hours, Clinton would be on the phone, playing cards with friends, gabbing about history and politics, or doing anything else that involved live human company. Obama is more likely to be spending time with papers or a book, or even to be online—prowling through the same blogs and news sites as the rest of us, which is somehow unnerving given a president’s otherwise total cocooning from the daily details of shopping, driving, waiting, in ordinary Americans’ lives.

Hence, Bill Clinton was/is a hub of his social network. A connector that builds a broad base of relationships he can then draw upon.

This makes me wonder how Bill Clinton would fare if he had social media at his disposal. Instead of a rolodex, he might have had thousands of Facebook friends (Dunbar number be dammed)!  This raises an interesting question about whether high intensity social network politicians might actually be better at governing.  One way Fallows claims Obama’s aloofness or inability to form broad based networks harms him is in staff selection.  Fallows finds a number of Democratic insiders complaining about the quality of the “talent” surrounding the president:

 Shortly after William Daley, himself the son and brother of Chicago mayors, succeeded Emanuel in the White House, he came to Obama with his initial report. You are reeling, he said—stating the obvious after the Republican surge. Part of the problem is that the team around you is not good enough. To raise your game, you have to surround yourself with the best people available. There have to be changes.

Obama thought about it, and reportedly called Daley back in a few days later. “I like my team,” he said. “I am comfortable with who I have around me. Just so there’s no miscommunication, I’m saying that I like this team.” (The White House declined to comment on the episode.)

“The people he is most ‘comfortable’ with have the same limits of experience he does,” a veteran political figure told me. “An emotional reliance on people who are good people, and smart, but simply not A-plus players—it’s a limit.” These discussions often revolve around the central role of Valerie Jarrett in the Obamas’ professional and social lives. Her supporters say that she is the one friend they can truly trust; her detractors say that her omnipresence illustrates the narrowness of the president’s contacts.

I’m not sure I buy this since it’s hard to determine who has “a level” talent, but this is an area of inquiry I haven’t yet seen. Is it possible that social media makes you better at governing by enabling you to build a broad based network? I’m still partial to the idea of a president reading briefing books until late into the night rather than playing poker with buddies, but that might be my own tempermental and professional biases peeking through.

So Facebook is going public. The circle is complete. Now Facebook users can invest in the company that turns them into the product being sold. The forthcoming IPO will no doubt lead to shareholder demands to become even more profitable by finding more ways to extract value out of it’s product… (e.g. you and me).

This is not an impossible task. There is so much more of ourselves that we could be sharing. Gary Wolf’s fantastic NYT article about the Quantified Self movement illustrates the ease with which we can collect data on ourselves. From miles run to pulse rate to mood, the ways in which we can “operationalize” ourselves are limitless. Social media has made this a norm. As one app designer put it:

“People got used to sharing,” says David Lammers-Meis, who leads the design work on the fitness-tracking products at Garmin. “The more they want to share, the more they want to have something to share.” Personal data are ideally suited to a social life of sharing. You might not always have something to say, but you always have a number to report.

This culture of sharing is personally rewarding in so many ways. But we just at the start of thinking about the negative consequences of accelerated sharing. What happens to those of use who want to be more judicious in what we share? The “to share or not to share” question” may be the most significant social question of the 21st century. Do we rush headlong into a sharing culture or do we resist it? As Gary Wolf’s article points out there is this great superficial collective itch that revealing satisfies:

When we quantify ourselves, there isn’t the imperative to see through our daily existence into a truth buried at a deeper level. Instead, the self of our most trivial thoughts and actions, the self that, without technical help, we might barely notice or recall, is understood as the self we ought to get to know.

This operationalization of the self provides as many challenges as it does benefits. In a book I’ve written about Facebook that will come out in July I argue that Facebook puts an undue stress on our desire to “know ourselves” through our symbolic interaction with those we “friend.” I want to offer a deeper concern — what happens to the “self we do not know” or even know we want to know? Anytime we make the self a subject, we’re drawn inward. We see the world “out there” through the lens of the interior, or the personal. But not everything is personal. Of course, we always see the world through our own eyes, but what I think accelerated sharing does is “wear grooves” into our being so that we have more difficulty standing outside of ourselves to see the objective world as it is. This undermines the possibility of seeing or imagining alternative notions of the self.

College professors around the world struggle with Facebook for their students attention (It’s OK, we know). Most of them take care of this by forbidding laptops from the classroom. But doing that removes an essential tool for “note taking” or learning further about the topic (some students I know actually do this).

The Web is a useful supplement for classroom learning, opening students up to the world of ideas and concepts the may be unfamiliar with or, more to the point, uncomfortable with. However, there is the sneaking suspicion on the part of faculty that our students aren’t “taking notes” on their laptops, they are checking Facebook.

How could they not. Facebook is the biggest social networking application in the world. The site is still in its toddler phase, but has achieved an impressive global reach, with 750 million users world wide. But this ubiquitousness happenened in a matter of months. A mere three yeras ago, MySpace had a larger user base than Facebook. To Internet scholars, that seems like a million years ago. Because of Facebook’s rapid rise, we know little about the impact the application has on our experience of the social world?

I’m writing a book for Ashgate Press where I make the case that Facebook produces a preference for “the personal” in ways that make users disdainful of, although not averse to, “the impersonal”. I argue that the emphasis on disclosure and connection on Facebook colors by the nature of our engagement with public (political) life.

To return to the classroom example, the power of disclosure and connection to a network of intimates is difficult for a professor to compete with. I am a stranger to most of my students. They don’t know me. They have no way of knowing whether what I’m saying in the classroom will be useful, or uncomfortable by making them think about things they have little control over.

By contrast, on Facebook, they can build deeper connections with people they have already vetted, people to which they are socially proximate. They can share intimate, subjective, feelings and observations about the world around them. They can talk about people they like, what professors are wearing, or how much fun they had the night before. Each update from a friend is a small burst of oxytocin that is next to impossible for someone talking about macro-economics to compete with.

But what if I am saying something my students need to know? What if I’m talking about impersonal systems and strucutres that do not have Facebook accounts or provide status updates. What if a discussion about addressing the Greek debt crisis isn’t based on how you feel about Greece, but requires the development of reasoning about how one builds institutions in an increasingly complex world. What if global warming is actually a “thing out there” and isn’t subject to how you or your friends “feel” about it. A tsunami caused by radical shifts in temperature that is about to crash over you isn’t interested in whether you “like” it or not.

This is what I suspect Facebook does to us….it engages us with the appealing world of disclosure and connection when many of our large scale problems have little to do with those two things.

Social media have been getting employees in hot water {remember the Cisco Fatty meme and the suspension of a professor for Facebook updates expressing frustration} and even candidates for office cannot escape the wayback machine glimpse into one’s past. I don’t think the “culture of optics” is a good thing and while before the advent of social media it was easier to control content, that is no longer the case without having a chilling effect on free speech.

The National Labor Relations Board has now ruled that a the Connecticut firm, American Medical Response, illegally fired an employee, Dawnmarie Souza, for criticizing her supervisor on Facebook, engaging in online conversations with others workers. Acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon , for the board announced::

“It’s the same as talking at the water cooler…The point is that employees have protection under the law to talk to each other about conditions at work.”

While many of the finger-waggers might think Souza et al. were engaging in a workplace facepalm moment and should expect negative consequences, the fact of the matter is that labour laws protect workers when discussing their jobs and working conditions, whether unionized or not. While Malcolm Gladwell may disagree, social media may provide an avenue for increased activism, including labour activism, which may be an issue if the economy remains in the doldrums and high unemployment creates a “buyers market” for labour.

Social media creates challenges for organizations to maintain their brand in an era of instantaneous and decentralized communications that can foster multiple dialogues outside of the control of the organization. These dialogues make the organization more transparent and can increase goodwill and trust. In fact, I would argue that the challenge of many organizations is to communicate both trust and competence with their stakeholders and social media can foster both.

What I think is going to happen is that organizations are going to continue surveillance of employees and focus on more rigorous screening at hiring. This won’t eliminate the thorny issue of what to do when social media fosters conversations that the organization doesn’t want to have or isn’t prepared for…which is why transparency’s a bitch.

Twitterversion:: [blog] Thoughts on NLRB ruling stating worker complaining about supervisor on Facebook was illegally fired. @ThickCulture @Prof_K